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Jordan hopes papal visit will boost tourism

A child is baptized in the waters of the Jordan River in Bethany. On Saturday, on his first trip to the Holy Land as leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis will visit the site. (MARCO LONGARI / AFP/GETTY IMAGES File Photo)

By William BoothTaylor LuckThe Washington Post

Wed., May 21, 2014

WEST BANK OF THE JORDAN RIVER—Christians believe that Jesus was immersed in the waters of the Jordan River by John the Baptist, who wore a cloak of camel’s hair and lived on locusts and honey in the desert wilderness.

But the Gospels are not precise about which side of the river the baptism took place — the east bank or the west.

Although it might not matter much to a half-million annual visitors who come to the river for sightseeing or a renewal of faith, it matters very much to tourism officials in Israel and Jordan, who maintain duelling baptism sites, one smack-dab across from the other, with the shallow, narrow, muddy stream serving as international boundary.

On Saturday, on his first trip to the Holy Land as leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis will visit the baptism site at Bethany Beyond the Jordan — on the eastern, or Jordanian, side of the river.

Jordanian officials are hoping to capitalize on Francis’s trip and highlight Christian pilgrimage sites across their country to market Jordan as “the other Holy Land.”

Jordan is hungry to take a bite out of the surging Bible tourism industry that it says generates more than $3 billion per year in neighbouring Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Francis will be the third pope to visit since 2000, when John Paul II made the first modern papal pilgrimage to the baptism site as part of a jubilee tour, signalling the Vatican’s blessing upon Bethany Beyond the Jordan as the likely site of Jesus’s baptism.

Yet Jordanian officials grumble that despite a body of archeological evidence, Bethany languishes in the shadow of Qasr al-Yahud, or the Castle of the Jews, a better-known, more popular and Israeli-marketed site across the river, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The Israeli Tourism Ministry describes Qasr al-Yahud as “the traditional spot where the New Testament narrative of the baptism of Jesus took place.”

Saar Kfir, the manager of the site for the Israeli parks agency, believes it more likely that Jesus was baptized on the west bank, as he arrived here from Nazareth. “He would have been on this side of the river,” Kfir said.

On a recent hot afternoon, most of the tourist traffic was on the river’s west bank, a closed military zone until a few years ago. Today it is an Israeli national park by day, but it is controlled by the Israel Defence Forces at night.

Tour buses unloaded pilgrims who walked past abandoned religious sites, barbed wire and signs that read “DANGER MINES!” to a gift shop that sells white robes to wear during baptism as well as T-shirts that read “America Don’t Worry — Israel is Behind You” and show a tank and a fighter jet.

At the river’s edge are steps and a rail. About nine metres away is Jordan. A swimmer could cross in a few strokes. Whenever that happens, Jordanian and Israeli soldiers stationed on their respective sides send them back.

In the space of an hour, hundreds of pilgrims and schoolchildren appeared on the Israeli-controlled side. On the Jordanian side, only a couple of tourists gathered at the water’s edge.

Last year, 430,000 tourists visited Qasr al-Yahud, while 90,000 travelled to Bethany, according to figures from the tourism ministries on both sides.

The Israeli site may be more popular because entry is free and it’s an hour’s drive from Jerusalem or Bethlehem. Going to Jordan requires some travellers to obtain a visa, and the nearby Allenby Bridge crossing between Israel and Jordan is often a gauntlet.

Also, unrest in the region, especially in Syria, continues to discourage western tour operators from venturing to Jordan, which witnessed a 6 per cent downturn in visitors last year despite its reputation as an oasis of stability.

In addition to the Jordan River’s baptism role, tradition says this is where the Jews crossed into the Land of Israel and where the prophet Elijah ascended to heaven.

Sleuths searching for the baptism site who favour Jordan point to pilgrim diaries dating to the early church, Roman road markers and a 6th-century mosaic map on the floor of St. George’s Orthodox Church in Madaba, Jordan.

Jordanian archeologists say the definitive evidence linking Bethany to Jesus’s baptism came in the form of a 4th-century monastery devoted to Elijah, which may have been commissioned by Helena, mother to Roman emperor Constantine, to mark the site of the baptism.

“When presented with the evidence, no one can deny that the baptism site is at Bethany, and that this is Bethany,” said Mohammad Waheeb, a Jordanian archeologist who spearheaded the rediscovery of the site in the late 1990s.

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